I installed Mint 19 Cinnamon with full disk encryption (an encrypted LVM.). Now GSmartControl is reporting an error at a particular LBA address. I think I should probably run fsck on the disk to try to correct this but I heard that fscking an encrypted volume might corrupt it and render the system unbootable. What's the correct procedure that I should follow?

Thanks.

Last edited by jaymot on Thu Dec 13, 2018 9:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

When I click on the drive in GSmartControl is says basic health check passed but when I run the short tests it says
"Test #","Type","Status","% Completed","Lifetime hours","LBA of the first error"
1,"Short offline","Completed with read failure","10%","4,273","1940867712"
2,"Short offline","Completed with read failure","10%","4,262","1940867712"
3,"Short offline","Completed with read failure","10%","4,249","1940867712"
4,"Short offline","Completed with read failure","10%","3,641","1940867712"
5,"Short offline","Completed with read failure","10%","3,619","1940867712"
6,"Short offline","Completed without error","100%","761","-"

Thanks. I restarted it right after scheduling a fsck on next boot and once more after that when I shut down before I went to bed. I took your advice and scheduled the fsck after 30 boots. We'll see what happens.

I don't think fsck can actually repair a bad block, can it? It just moves whatever's on it elsewhere if it can and marks the block as "do not use"?

I'm just a tad worried that the hard drive in this machine isn't long for this world bcause, it being an ultrabook, it has to be taken to a shop to have the drive replaced as there are no access panels on the bottom for the hdd and ram like there are with regular laptops, so it isn't something I can do myself. If it's in a shop it will take them 2 to 3 weeks, judging by experience, or even longer if they don't have a drive in stock and have to order one.

Question: the only difference between a mobile HDD and a regular one is the mobile drives have a lower RPM to save power when running on battery, right? So theoretically I could replace this 1TB mobile drive with a regular 2TB or larger drive (I don't think I can get mobile HDDs larger than 1TB here)? I only run the machine on AC anyway because I don't travel very much so the only thing I use the battery for is power-filtering and as a built-in UPS.

It went past the max mount count of 30 and it's now back to #6. I never saw it running fsck.

I booted from the installation USB stick and tried

sudo fsck -fvCy /dev/mapper/mint--vg-root

but it said it couldnt find /dev/mapper/mint--vg-root. When I looked in /dev/mapper all that was there was a file named "control". When I rebooted back into my main Mint installation on the hard drive, entered my encryption password, logged in then browser /dev/mapper on the hard drive it contains control, mint--vg-root, mint--vg-swap and sda3_crypt.

What prompted me to want to run fsck in the first place is that I already have smartmontools and gsmartcontrol installed, and gsmartcontrol is reporting an error 10% of the way into the quick test, which then fails.

i fixed the vg--root etc.. in another way.
i boot with a live usb, than decripted the hd volume, then by DISKS app i select the volume and select "repair file system".
rebot and no more vg--root....... error.

I finally got around to checking the disk as SMART reported an imminent failure recently. It fixed a few very minor problems with a few inodes being "too narrow", whatever that means, but after I ran fsck with -fcy command-line switches it detected no bad blocks. I had similar issues in the past where SMART actually took my main HD out of service due to a supposed failure yet when I disabled SMART in the BIOS the drive worked just fine for years. I may be cynical but it's as if SMART technology is just a ploy by manufacturers to sell more drives.

Thank you for your help! I'll still back-up often but I'll sleep easier knowing that the drive in this system is really OK.